/[gxemul]/trunk/RELEASE

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-revision 24 by dpavlin,
Mon Oct  8 16:19:56 2007 UTC
+revision 38 by dpavlin,
Mon Oct  8 16:21:53 2007 UTC
 Line 1
- Release notes for Gavare's eXperimental Emulator (GXemul), 0.4.0
+ Release notes for Gavare's eXperimental Emulator (GXemul), 0.4.5
  ================================================================
- Copyright (C) 2003-2006  Anders Gavare.
+ Copyright (C) 2003-2007  Anders Gavare.
  GXemul is an experimental instruction-level machine emulator. Several
 Line 9 
 emulation modes are available. In some m
  hardware components are emulated well enough to let unmodified operating
  systems (e.g. NetBSD) run as if they were running on a real machine.
- The documentation lists the machines and guest operating systems that can
+ Processors (ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, SuperH) are emulated using dynamic
- be regarded as "working" in GXemul. The best supported guest operating
+ translation. Unlike some other dynamically translating emulators, GXemul
- systems are probably NetBSD/pmax, NetBSD/cats, and OpenBSD/cats.
+ does not need to generate native code, only a "runnable intermediate
+ representation", and will thus run on any host architecture.
- The most important change between release 0.3.8 and 0.4.0 is:
-     o)  The emulation of MIPS processors has been completely rewritten;
-         it now uses the same portable dynamic translation system as the
-         ARM and PowerPC emulation modes.
-         On Alpha and i386 hosts (and AMD64 hosts running in 32-bit mode),
-         GXemul previously used translation into native code. This release
-         will perform worse than 0.3.8 on those host architectures.
-         On all other hosts (including AMD64 running in native 64-bit mode),
+ The documentation lists the machines and guest operating systems that can
-.4.0 is likely to be faster than 0.3.8, when emulating MIPS, at
+ be regarded as "working" in GXemul. The best working guest operating
-         least for R3000 emulation.
+ systems are probably NetBSD/pmax and NetBSD/cats.
-         I think that in the long term, moving towards full portability like
-         this is a good idea.
- (Since the MIPS emulation mode has been rewritten from scratch, and I have
- not really had much time over for debugging, there are most likely new
- bugs in 0.4.0 that were not present in 0.3.8. However, I feel that it is
- better to make a quick release now than to wait even longer.)
- There have also been many other changes, including, but not limited to:
-     o)  The "test machine" functionality is more well-defined than before,
+ The changes between release 0.4.4.1 and 0.4.5 include, among other things:
-         and some tutorial-like demos have been added. These could be useful
-         e.g. in operating system construction courses.
-     o)  NetBSD/sgimips 3.0 works now. This is most likely due to the rewrite
+     o)  Initial support for "disk overlays" has been implemented. This
-         of the MIPS emulation mode. Previous releases of GXemul only worked
+         enables e.g. simple roll-back of emulated disk contents to a
-         with NetBSD/sgimips 2.1.
+         previous state.
-     o)  I have begun implementing rudimentary support for GDB remote serial
+     o)  Dyntrans bug fixes; code translations on physical addresses that
-         protocol connections. This means that you can run e.g. the Data
+         were offset a multiple of 128 MB from each other could either
-         Display Debugger, and connect it to a GXemul instance.
+         cause weird bugs, or translation leaks (leading to unnecessary
+         dyntrans cache overflows).
-         No advanced GDB functionality is working yet, but starting and
+     o)  Some cleanup: The GDB debugging stub support, some dummy machine
-         stopping the emulated machine and single-stepping should work.
+         modes (TS7200, Walnut, PB1000, and Meshcube), and some dummy or
+         experimental CPUs (RCA180x and Transputer) have been removed, to
+         make the emulator slightly more maintainable.
- Please read the HISTORY files for more details.
+ Please read the HISTORY file for more details.
  Files included in this release are:
-   BUGS                        List of known bugs for this release.
    HISTORY                     Detailed revision history / changelog.
    LICENSE                     Copyright message / license.
    README                      Quick start instructions, for the impatient.
-Line 151 
 them like this is in order:
+Line 132 
 them like this is in order:
      This product includes software developed by Ichiro FUKUHARA.
+     This product includes software developed by Marcus Comstedt.
  Also, src/include/alpha_rpb.h requires the following:
      Copyright (c) 1994, 1995, 1996 Carnegie-Mellon University.
-Line 168 
 See individual files for license details
+Line 151 
 See individual files for license details
  or reuse code.
- Thanks to (in no specific order) Joachim Buss, Olivier Houchard, Juli Mallett,
- Juan Romero Pardines, Alec Voropay, G�ran Weinholt, Alexander Yurchenko, and
- everyone else who has provided me with feedback.
- Special thanks to Alec Voropay for testing this release with Linux
- kernels, and on Cygwin, and also thanks to Ondrej Palkovsky for testing
- with HelenOS.
  If you have found GXemul useful in some way, or feel like sending me comments
- or feedback in general, then mail me at anders(at)gavare.se.
+ or feedback in general, then mail me at anders(At)gavare.se.

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